Recent content by Gorgon Zee

I would be as happy with that as “I use persuade” or “I use mind control”. If the player is not very experienced I’d let any of these slide, but after a while I’d urge them to let me know their intent. For me, that is the most important piece of info I need to adjudicate a mechanical element...

Similarly — I basically agree with you. Definitely the character does not know that the fun is in going insane, and I think it would be just as much a sour note if a player actively sought out those plots as it would be if they avoid it. For me, the genre of CoC is “weird things happen to...

But that's exactly what they are! They are a mechanical, formal way of quantifying how your character can interact with the world -- they are the "game" in roleplaying. For me, one of the reasons I like more modern systems as opposed to trad and OSR style games is that the newer games make an...

I do agree that it is not an absolute -- few things are! But my experience running CoC is that the genre shows people investigating randomly, reading odd journals etc. It's the rules that make it dangerous to the characters. Which is why I argue that saying that characters should act based on...

But the character exists IN the genre — the only understanding they should have is based on the genre, not on a simulation of the player’s world. I’d argue that if you are playing a game set in a a given genre, then your character should act as the genre dictates; if you, the player, are...

It's a very gamist way of playing, which is fine for many people. But it often feels like an artificial constraint imposed by the game system. As an example, if I'm in a group that is attending a fancy dress ball and I'm playing AD&D, if a guest invites me to head out alone with them to see...

One thing I do for situations like this is ask for everyone who wants to try to make a roll, then I look at the group successes and failures and adjudicate like that. So if 2 players notice the footprints and 2 do not, I might say something like “you think you saw something on the ground, but...

It appears you think that authorship is a zero-sum game; if the players get to do more, it means the GM gets less. That really, really has not been my experience. When my players author parts of our game, it drives my creativity, sparks new ideas and helps me author better. For me, a GM who...

Metacurrency as a mechanical resource This is the use of a currency as a resource; used to modify a mechanical effect. Like burning extra effort, a re-roll, an auto-success or a modification to a resolution technique. I'm generally a fan of this -- it gives a player a chance to signal when...

I think it depends how you think of them. You could think of them as spending extra effort. As a real-world example, when I would fight in martial arts, I'd have a generally sustainable level of effort that I could use for a match, but every now and again I'd want to exceed that and "spend...

For me, the answer is that I want to balance the fun factor in the options versus the cognitive effort to learn them. For games that I enjoy, Fate has universal rules that apply to everyone, and so a very low cognitive burden, but it does mean the options are less fun because they're all very...

I found it pretty fast to run combats and with experienced agents they did feel significantly high-powered. People were pushing opponents out windows, making called shots, using preparedness to activate traps, using MOS to do way over the top stuff (like jumping between helicopters) — that sort...

This is a very interesting example. About half the people find this a very cool mechanic and love it. But another half find that the implementation is a real problem. I was in the second group as I found myself annoyed by the mechanics and doing very non-genre things to avoid auto-failing future...

Heh. In all honestly, I don’t think I could run the same campaign for a decade even. I understand the appeal of the “I’ve been running the same D&D campaign since I was 12” guys, but for me it would be like always eating the same food for dinner. Sure, I like what I’m eating, but I’d miss out on...

I’ve run maybe 20-30 year+ long campaigns, and only three I abandoned. One was when I found that the material I was using was by an abusive person, and I felt incapable of continuing to read it. One was killed by Covid, and one was a Doctor Who campaign that I found just too hard to keep coming...